With prosperity and development of the telecommunications market, the market of basic telecommunications services continuously expands and becomes mature. How to serve with higher quality and provide more diversified services becomes a weight in competition between operators. Network investment is major expenditure of the operators. Especially nowadays, as mobile network traffic increases sharply, a conventional mobile network operator needs to invest a huge sum of capital to construct and upgrade a network, so that financial pressure is high. By contrast, a mode in which a service can be provided by renting a network has an advantage of cost reduction. Generally, such a manner that a network is shared is referred to as network sharing.
The network sharing may be network sharing between operators, or may be network sharing between an operator and a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO). The mobile virtual network operator generally refers to an operator that does not have an operation license or that needs to use an existing network of a basic mobile network operator (MNO) to develop its own users and provide services to the users as a development scale is limited. A mobile network operator that has an operation license may also rent a network of another mobile network operator to develop its own users and provide services, and may also be considered as a mobile virtual network operator. With enhancement of a network sharing capability, a network of one mobile network operator may serve multiple participant mobile network operators (PMNO, Participant MNO) (that is, basic mobile network operators or mobile virtual network operators). The mobile network operator that serves the multiple participant mobile network operators needs to perform network resource management and control for the participant mobile network operators, to ensure that all the served participant mobile network operators have sufficient network resources to use. In the prior art, when network resource management and control are performed for a participant mobile network operator in a network sharing scenario, the management and control are mainly performed by using a bearer as a granularity, that is, the management and control are performed for a network resource corresponding to each bearer. In addition, a quantity of all resources that can be used by each participant mobile network operator in a policy and charging enforcement function (PCEF) entity and a quantity of all resources that can be used by each participant mobile network operator in a PCRF entity are fixed.
In a process of studying and practicing the prior art, the inventor of the present invention finds that, the prior-art manner of managing a resource in a shared network is not sufficiently flexible and precise, does not have a desirable control effect, and leads to a resource waste.